On these frigid days, it helps to think about a place like Antarctica, which was recently determined to be without a doubt the coldest place on Earth (as if anyone was really surprised?). But it's also home to unique historic monuments befitting the treacherous environment that include 100-year-old huts, industrial…

The Los Angeles City Council ruled last week to give landmark status to Johnie's Coffee Shop, a blue-and-white striped diner in the city's Miracle Mile district. Opened in 1956, the building's dramatic angles and flashy neon made it a darling of L.A.'s newly car-centered culture.

At the height of his career as the architect of the Third Reich, Albert Speer was already imagining what his buildings would look like as ruins. In fact, by the mid-1930s, Speer was designing based on “ruin law,” his term for what a building would look like once it decayed. Today, Nuremberg city officials are…